Here’s a paraphrasing of an email I got this morning from Harvard biologist Naomi Pierce:

“I don’t know if you remember, but I mentioned a few years ago how Vladimir Nabokov, best known as a novelist, was also a self-taught expert on butterflies. In 1945 he had a wild idea about how his favorite group of butterflies evolved that no one took seriously. Well, for the past decade I and my colleagues have been scouring the Andes for butterflies and sequencing their DNA to test his hypothesis. And he turns out to have been right in all sorts of ways.

[Update: here’s the new paper that vindicates Nabokov, and here’s his 1945 monograph [click on the pdf link for a free file!]. Check out his Nabokovian conclusion at p.44, plus his painstaking drawings of butterfly sex organs.]

Comments (9)

What a great story! I have always been impressed by the fact Nabokov could write brilliantly in three different languages and that he wrote one of the greatest novels of the English language — Lolita — without being a native speaker. And now I find out he was a great scientist too. Incredible!

An interesting finding, and nice NYT story. My favorite intersection of Nabokov’s fiction and lepidoptery is his focus on the nymphs – the nymphet Dolores Haze in Lolita, and the family Nymphalidae in his butterfly studies. Nabokov named his first American butterfly discovery Neonympha dorothea, which always seemed provocatively close to his literary creation, the nymphet Dolores.

In his book “Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees” (2007), Roger Deakin writes about Nabakov’s obsession with Lepidoptera and quotes him as saying, “My pleasures […] are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”